In 2009, Ruzuku co-founder Rick Cecil interviewed Patti Digh as part of our "From There to Here" series — conversations about the realities of dream-chasing. Patti is the author of Life Is a Verb and Creative Is a Verb, a business consultant who left corporate leadership to pursue writing, and the creator of the blog "37 Days" — which grew from 12 readers to nearly 20,000 in six months.
Her story holds lessons I keep coming back to when I'm working with course creators who are wrestling with the same questions she was: Am I really an expert? Is this really mine to do? What if I just started anyway?
The Expertise You Won't Claim
One of the most striking moments in the conversation came when Rick asked Patti a deceptively simple question:
"Help me understand why it is, when somebody asks you what you do for a living, you never say, 'I'm a writer.' ...You've written three books and published hundreds of articles. What bar would you have to have reached for you to be able to say that you're a writer?"
Patti's honest answer was essentially: she didn't know. Three books. Hundreds of articles. Thousands of readers. And still the reluctance to claim the title.
"It's real easy for us to minimize what we do in the world."
I've seen this pattern with course creators more times than I can count. Therapists with 20 years of clinical practice who hesitate to call themselves experts. Yoga teachers who've trained hundreds of students but feel like they need one more certification before they can teach online. The bar keeps moving — and it only ever moves up.
Patti eventually landed on a definition that I think is worth sitting with:
"There's a great quote: 'A writer is someone who longs to say something.' That's a true description of who I am."
If you long to teach something — if you keep coming back to the same ideas, the same frustrations with how your field gets it wrong, the same desire to help people understand what you understand — that's not a hobby. That's a calling worth taking seriously.
Single Intention and the Power of Starting Small
Patti started her blog "37 Days" after her stepfather died 37 days after a lung cancer diagnosis. She didn't start it with a growth strategy or a content calendar. She started it because she had something urgent to say.
"I would literally sit every day and write for eight hours a day. I described it to a good friend of mine recently as the most fulfilling, happiest time I can remember in my life. And I think that sense of fulfillment was that I had found what is mine to do in the world."
The growth that followed wasn't engineered. It was a natural consequence of that clarity:
"I actually think that the single intention and the urgency that I felt around it was the thing that drove people to the work. I first sent it out to 12 friends... Within six months, there were between 15,000 and 20,000 people reading this blog."
Twelve people. That's where it started. Not a launch plan. Not a paid ad campaign. Twelve people who cared enough to share something genuine with others who cared.
I'll be honest — I don't think every course creator will see that kind of exponential growth. Most won't, and that's fine. But the underlying principle is something I've seen validated again and again on our platform: the courses that build the strongest followings aren't the ones with the slickest production. They're the ones where the creator has found their version of "what is mine to do" and teaches from that place of urgency and clarity.
Measuring What Doesn't Matter
Patti was refreshingly direct about the trap of metrics-chasing:
"A lot of people write to me and say, 'Help me understand how I can build a successful blog?' How many followers? How many books? How many cities? I think it's very easy to focus on things that are easy to measure, but don't really matter."
This is the tension every course creator faces. Follower counts, email list size, revenue per launch — these numbers are real and they do matter operationally. But they're not the thing. The thing is whether you're doing work that changes how your students see themselves and their possibilities.
Patti told a story about a friend named David, a talented artist who was stuck. She asked him a question that reframed everything:
"David, how would you approach your art if you truly believe that your art could provide everything that you ever needed or wanted?"
That question is worth asking yourself about your course. Not "will this hit 100 enrollments?" but "what would I build if I truly believed this work could sustain me?" The answer usually looks very different — bolder, more personal, more honest.
Desire Lines
My favorite moment in the interview was when Patti introduced the concept of "desire lines" — the unofficial dirt paths that form when people cut across lawns instead of following the concrete sidewalk.
"Do you spend your life going on the concrete path because that's what you think you need to do, or do you make your own line, do you follow your own path?"
The online course world is full of concrete paths: follow this launch formula, use this webinar template, build your funnel this way. Some of that advice is genuinely useful. But the creators who build something lasting — the ones whose students stay for years — are almost always the ones who stepped off the prescribed path at some point and followed their own desire line.
They taught the course nobody was "supposed" to teach. They structured it in a way that didn't match the playbook. They priced it based on what felt right for their community rather than what some calculator told them to charge.
That's what Patti did with "37 Days." There was no model for what she built. She just started writing about something that mattered to her, sent it to 12 people, and let the desire line form behind her.
Finding What Is Yours to Do
If you're in the early stages of building a course — or if you've been at it for a while and something still feels off — Patti's story is worth returning to. Not because she had some secret formula, but because she didn't. She had urgency, honesty, and the willingness to start with 12 people.
Stop waiting for the bar to stop moving. Stop minimizing what you already know. Find the thing that's yours to do, and start doing it — even if "starting" means sending it to 12 friends and seeing what happens.
This article is based on a "From There to Here" interview conducted by Rick Cecil, Ruzuku co-founder, in 2009. The conversation has been edited and reframed for today's course creators.